April 2014

When scientists describe a new animal species, they give it a name, according to rules of the ICZN, the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature. Species names can honor a person or the place where the animal lives, or reflect the personality of the describer, as in the case of the beetle Gelae donut (Miller and Wheeler 2004). Emmet Reid Dunn (1894-1956), who earned his PhD at Harvard under Thomas Barbour, expressed his sense of...